Following in the ways of FreeBSD, the NetBSD operating system is soon going to be importing LLVM and the Clang C/C++ compiler for use on their platform.

NetBSD has long been wanting to move to LLVM/Clang and it appears they're finally close. Among the reasons that the BSD distributions have been quick to promote Clang to being a first-rate compiler include the more liberal BSD-like license over GCC being GPLv3, Clang has faster build times than GCC while using less memory, Clang has great error reporting and diagnostic abilities, and there's a whole host of interesting features from LLDB to other unique projects based upon LLVM. The LLVM Clang compiler performance is also close to that of GCC on x86/x86_64 and ARM except for select situations.

Confirmation of NetBSD soon importing LLVM/Clang came via the LLVM development list with Joerg Sonnenberger of NetBSD suggesting upstream changes for better handling the back-porting of patches in stable release branches.

One of the main gcc issues that this compiler is actually maintained by employees of some large Linux vendors like RedHat. These vendors don't have interest to keep the newer versions running on ancient processors like 680000 or Vax. Nobody is interested in buying a RedHat support contract for a VAX, so why should RedHat sponsor their employees to work on gcc for these fossils?

That is why you see that OpenBSD and NetBSD releases for these hardware platforms are obligated to use a different older version of gcc, than for the more popular architectures like amd64 and i386. The newer gcc versions have dropped support for older architectures.

But LLVM is maintained by people from Apple which is no less a big company than RedHat. Do you mean that Apple, known for its strict hardware policy, will show more care for obscure and legacy architectures? I'm just asking as I don't know much about that Clang thing.